Monthly Archives: September 2017

For those who have to do legal research you may be familiar with Lexis Advance, previously known as Lexis Nexis. Legal research can be a daunting prospect but Lexis Advance’s new design has lots of handy little tricks that can give you a leg up on your legal research. Here are our Law Librarians top tips for getting started with Lexis Advance.

Advanced Search – This is where all the old search forms from Lexis Nexis have gone including Cases and Legislation. These advanced search forms allow you make your search more specific. For example you can search for cases related to a provision of legislation or for legislation that contains a defined term.

Analytical Materials – This is what all secondary sources in Lexis Advanced are called and this includes dictionaries, encyclopaedias, journal articles and commentaries. Use the Advanced Search form for Analytical Material to search throughout all secondary sources. Or locate the full list of Analytical Materials for Australia by selecting the Browse button at the top of the screen > Publications > Australia > By Content Type > AU Analytical Materials.

Search Everything – This button is located next to the main, red search box and is very powerful! If you click on it options appear for narrowing your search. This includes jurisdictions and content such as cases, legislation, analytical materials and forms and precedents. You can also narrow by legal topics and any recent publication or searches you have looked at.

Favourites – Add your most used searches or publications to your favourites box so you can easily access them. This is one of the best parts about Lexis Advance! You can do this by clicking the star next to the publication title either when in the publication itself or by looking at the Recent & Favourites tab under the Search Everything button. Once the star is yellow it’s a favourite, yay! And you can access it from the home page of Lexis Advance.

For more assistance with legal research pop into the Gardens Point Law Library on Level 5 of C Block or contact us!

Numbered referencing can be one tough cookie to crack. One particular question we get asked a lot is how to reference an image taken from the internet using QUT Numbered referencing. Have no fear! We have consulted the experts and this is the template we recommend.

[number] Author. Title of image [image on the Internet]. Date [cited date]. Available from: URL

Don’t have all of these pieces of information for your image? Here are some handy hints on how to navigate this.

No author? Check for an organisation or corporate author. If still none, omit this information

No date? Replace this section with [date unknown].

No title? Write a brief description of the image in square brackets and put this where the title would be.

Of course this only makes sense with some examples. Have a look at these to get more of an idea of what your numbered reference should look like for an image.

PubMed is a freely available version of the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database and also provides access to some additional content not selected for MEDLINE. PubMed doesn’t contain full-text articles, but may link to publishers’ websites and other resources

Access PubMed via QUT Library’s Databases and specialised search tools. You can then select Health or view all databases to find the PubMed link. When you connect to PubMed, using your QUT login details, and search for information a QUT Fulltext Finder link may appear. This allows you to check if a fulltext copy of an article is available via QUT Library.

Simple steps for searching PubMed:

Identify your search terms for each of your main concepts

Perform a simple search by entering terms in the PubMed search box

Include terms from the controlled vocabulary MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

Use the advanced search to see your search history and combine searches

Did you know that QUT Library’s Quickfind searches over 80% of all the resources available at QUT? If you are looking for a book, journal article, report or newspaper article this is a great first place to look!

Quickfind’s Advanced Search can help you find information you need efficiently. You can find the Advanced Search underneath the Quickfind Search Bar.

Once you are in the Advance Search screen type your keywords into the search boxes. To search efficiently, put each concept or keyword on a different line and choose the right Search Operators to separate the lines. After you’ve entered your keywords you can refine your results further by selecting certain publication years to look at or by choosing the content type you want to focus on, such as articles or books. Advanced Search also allows you to select peer reviewed sources as another option to refine your results. By refining your search using the Advanced Search you will save time and get to relevant results faster, woo!

Here are our top tips to get the most out of advanced searches –

Speak the database’s language. Figure out your keywords and synonyms first and how link them with search operators used by the database so it can understand exactly what you are looking for.

Don’t be afraid to change your search strategy. Look in your results for other keywords or synonyms you can use and try different keywords and combinations.

Try new things. Change the field you are searching in. If you are getting too many results from searching All Fields, try searching for your keywords just within the abstract, or look for a particular author.